Investigating Easter: Four Shadows with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the Medichurch podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at Medichurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Now, we're not gonna lie to you, Christianity requires faith.

But for the skeptic, many people believe our faith is blind.

And if you can just see that, maybe there are in fact good reasons to investigate the claims of Christianity that an intellectually honest person will look into that truth because an intellectually honest person wants to find the truth.

Now, if you've missed our other weekends in the series, you can get caught up really easily at our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash metachurch.

Last week, we looked carefully at the New Testament documents.

We were asking whether or not we could rely on them.

Do they tell us the truth about what happened during that time?

And since the New Testament reports the historical details of miracles, we talked about whether or not miracles are in fact possible.

Today, we're gonna zoom out to an even broader view of scripture.

My message today is four shadows, four shadows.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we love you and we thank you for your great love for us.

We thank you in a world where we are all looking for something to believe in, to put our hope in, to bank on for our future, that you stand as a rock, steadfast, that you can hold the weight of our hope and our expectation.

I thank you for a place like Metachurch for all people and all different parts of their faith journey.

God, I pray that we would come and just humble ourselves and be open to whatever it is you want to say to us.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to learn about four shadow, say amen.

Amen.

So we've looked at what the Bible is in part because we talked about the New Testament last week.

The New Testament was written after Jesus came to earth.

It's all about his life and then the movement that was started that we call the church.

We learned in last week's message that the documents of the New Testament are the most reliable, historically verified text from the ancient world, and nothing else even comes close.

Now, if you weren't here and you're with us today or streaming online, and that sounds crazy to you, you have to go to the YouTube channel and check that out.

Today we're gonna zoom out and look also at the Old Testament.

The Old Testament obviously came first, it's older, right?

It's the older testament.

It was written uh over hundreds of years, almost a thousand years, and you may not know this, the New Testament was closed, meaning it was finished about 450 years before Jesus ever showed up.

So if you've ever read through the Bible and you thought that once you got to the last page of the Old Testament, a few weeks passed and then Jesus came, that's incorrect.

About 450-year gap in between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Now, everything in the Old Testament pointed the way to the coming of Jesus, and it was written in part so that we would recognize him and believe in him when he showed up.

Here's where it gets really interesting.

The Old Testament is filled with over 300 specific predictions about who the coming Messiah would be.

In fact, in over the 300 of these, it creates almost incalculable odds of one person showing up and fulfilling all of these things.

Now, as believers, we would call these prophecies given by God through men in the ancient world who were prophets and spoke to God for us.

You see, to be an Israelite was to typically live a very difficult life, and that's not just in biblical times.

You you know this if you know anything about history.

It has been difficult to be an Israelite for basically all of human history.

In the Old Testament, they were under captivity of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, during Jesus' time, under the captivity of the Romans, and they were constantly looking, like all of us are, for something that they could believe in, the promise of a Savior who would one day come.

And the prophets put out all of these numbers.

300 plus predictions.

Now, you may not know about the Old Testament.

It was not written by one person, like a lot of religious books.

It was written by dozens of men over the course of hundreds of years, almost a thousand years, on multiple different continents and geographical areas, many of these men who never knew each other and did not collaborate on their predictions.

And what this creates is odds of someone coming and actually pulling off what was predicted.

And so let's talk odds.

It's the perfect time of year to do so because it's March Madness right now, and none of you have a bracket that's still together because of freaking Kentucky, am I right?

Now, if you're putting money into a March Madness bracket, you need to know this ever since they expanded the tournament, your odds of a perfect March Madness bracket are one in 120 billion with a B.

Very low odds.

Now, the Powerball is in the hundreds of millions right now.

You shouldn't play the lotto either.

Uh, you know, not because God's gonna strike you dead, it's just you're gonna throw your money away.

But the odds of the Powerball are one in 292.2 million.

In other words, if you're gonna put$20 into a March Madness bracket, you might as well go buy 10 Powerball tickets.

You have way better odds, right?

The odds just go up and up.

Uh I found out that your odds in any given year of being struck by lightning are about one in 1.2 million, and I was hoping it was so much higher than that.

Like, I was not scared of lightning before writing this sermon, and now I'm a little bit concerned, right?

That's not a lot.

Like, one out of every 1.2 million people get struck by lightning.

There's 1.2 million people in San Antonio, and I'm one of them, right?

I don't like those odds.

A group of mathematicians several years ago, they came together, some of the most esteemed mathematicians in the world, and they tried to predict the odds for one person to show up hundreds of years after the Old Testament prophecies were made.

And they said, if you take any eight prophecies at random, any of the eight predictions, now there's over 300, but pull any eight of them at random for one person to come and fulfill all eight of those perfectly, they estimated that the odds were a staggering one in one hundred quadrillion.

That is one, uh that is ten to the seventeenth power.

Let me put this in perspective.

If you had a hundred quadrillion dollars, then I just want to remind you that giving kiosks, you go out.

If you had one hundred quadrillion dollars, you could buy every single living human on earth a$20 million mansion.

That's how big of a number we're talking about.

In other words, someone coming hundreds of years later, fulfilling any eight of the Old Testament prophecies perfectly, while it's rationally possible, maybe, it is mathematically impossible.

Here's what's even crazier.

Jesus didn't just fulfill eight of the predictions in the Old Testament, he fulfilled all of them.

And by doing so, there is not a number that could represent the odds of Jesus coming and fulfilling all of these prophecies.

Let's look at a few of them from the Old Testament.

700 years before Jesus, the prophet Micah wrote, But you, O Bethlehem, are only a small village in Judah, and yet a ruler of Israel will come from you, whose origins are from the distant past.

And in the Hebrew that Micah originally wrote in, from the distant past literally means from eternity.

And sure enough, Bethlehem, this little podunk, middle of nowhere, meaningless part of Israel, is exactly where a census is taken that brings Joseph and Mary back for the birth of Christ.

In the eighth century, a prophet named Isaiah got even more specific about the birth of Jesus.

He said, The Lord himself will choose a sign.

Here's the sign: look, the virgin will conceive a child.

The virgin will give birth to a son.

Now, even like 700 years before Jesus, when Isaiah wrote this, the people were like, Isaiah is off his medicine, right?

Like, virgins do not give birth.

He said, This is going to be the sign to look for, a sign that is impossible.

And yet we read in all of the gospel accounts that Mary was, in fact, a virgin when she miraculously conceived.

Around 520 BC, another prophet named Zechariah looked forward to the day that they would welcome the king of kings into Jerusalem.

But he had a very odd picture because everyone would imagine this great Messiah riding in on a majestic white horse.

Instead, Zechariah says, shout in triumph, O people of Jerusalem, look, your king is coming to you.

He is righteous and victorious, yet he is humble, riding on a donkey, even on a donkey's colt.

550 years later, this strange scene actually played out.

These aren't vague predictions, they aren't generalizations, they are specific prophecies, and the men who wrote them claimed that they came from God, and they all came true in the same person, Jesus.

And there's more.

There are even prophecies about the death of Jesus.

In Psalm 22, God used King David to prophesy: My life is poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.

My enemies surround me like a pack of dogs.

An evil game closes in on me.

They have pierced my hands, and they have pierced my feet.

King David wrote about this about a thousand years before the crucifixion of Jesus.

And what might even be more shocking is he wrote about this about five hundred years before crucifixion was invented as a form of execution.

The prophecies from the Old Testament are stunning and direct, and when you consider that one person, Jesus, fulfilled all of the predictions about the coming of the Messiah, it should at least make you stop and consider that maybe there is something to the Old Testament, which looked forward to the coming of Christ, and the New Testament, which tells the story of Christ Himself.

However, it's not just the direct prophecy of the Old Testament that points us to Jesus.

Once you begin to understand the birth and life, the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, you start to see that the entire Old Testament, like virtually every page of it, points us to the coming of Jesus.

Some of these are prophecies given directly by prophets.

The rest are the stories, the narratives that make up the Old Testament, all of which seem to foreshadow the coming of Christ in one way or another.

Today is Good Friday, or this week is Good Friday, the day we contemplate the crucifixion of Jesus.

All throughout the Old Testament, this moment is foreshadowed.

I want to look today at four stories.

Now, these will be our four shadows of what is to come, foreshadowing.

You see what I did there as a play on words, right?

Foreshadows that foreshadow.

I worked hard on that, okay?

The four shadows that are going to foreshadow the life of Jesus.

And we're gonna start way at the beginning.

The story of Abraham starts in the 12th chapter of the first book of the Old Testament.

Abraham, of course, is the father of nations, including the father of the nation of Israel.

And God had come to him and promised that he would have an incredible legacy that would turn into a nation.

And one day, through his lineage, the entire world would be blessed.

Now, as Christians, we believe that that promise was fulfilled at Easter through Jesus.

However, at the beginning, this promise grew dimmer and dimmer as Abraham and his wife Sarah got older and older.

And eventually, Abraham was even so old that most men would not be able to have a child by his age.

And his wife was so old it had become impossible for her to conceive.

But Abraham had faith in a God who can do the impossible.

And they had a child, his name was Isaac, and he was Abraham's miracle son.

And he was the catalyst for the promise of a great nation that would bless the whole world.

And Abraham loved his son with every fiber of his being.

I never truly understood the power of this story until I had sons of my own.

I have two sons.

And it's my personal opinion that these sons were also miraculously given to me.

And I love them with every fiber of my being.

Which is why when God comes to Abraham after giving him his miracle son and asks him to now sacrifice that child to take his life, to give it back to the Lord.

It's a very difficult story.

And you know, uh I don't come here on Sundays to preach at you.

I'm preaching with you, and I'm growing with you, and I'm hoping to mature more and more in the Lord because I'm not sure at this point in my life if I have the faith of Abraham to take one of my sons.

I don't know if my trust is at that level.

You see, Abraham was going to be the father of God's people, and God needed to make sure that Abraham had a heart like his own.

And Abraham trusted God, and they began to climb up the mountain where he would build an altar, where he would sacrifice his son.

Now, something you need to know is at that point in time, the nations of the world, they would often sacrifice their children.

As a matter of fact, we know in scripture that Abraham's father himself was an idolater.

God called him away from his family to sanctify him as his own.

There's a chance Abraham's very familiar with child sacrifice.

Where he lived in the world, the nations around him, many of them worshipped a god named Molech, and they would sacrifice their firstborn by throwing their firstborn into the fires of Molech with the promise of financial prosperity on the other side.

So the idea of sacrificing your child isn't something outrageous to someone living in the ancient pagan world.

It was surprising though, coming from a God who that seemed to be the antithesis of his character.

So Abraham believes God and he begins to climb the mountain.

And it's like every step weighs a thousand pounds.

Every moment feels like a thousand years.

The closer they get to the top, the more heartbreaking it is.

And if you have kids, you know this.

One thing you can count on is your kid is going to ask the worst question at the worst time, right?

Like you can just like clockwork, you know that's gonna happen.

In Genesis 22, then Isaac spoke to his father Abraham and said, Hey, the fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?

And Abraham answered, God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.

The two of them walked on together.

This is the faith of Abraham.

It's why God chose him.

He fully submitted and trusted God.

In verse 9, when they arrived at the place that God had told him about, Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood, and he bound his son Isaac and he placed him on the altar on top of the wood.

And then Abraham reached out and he took the knife to slaughter his son.

But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham, and he replied, Here I am.

And he said, Do not lay a hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your only son from me.

A father, painstakingly willing to give up his only son.

There are a million lessons that we could learn from this passage, but it is also a shadow of things to come.

Abraham, confident in who he knew God to be, told Isaac, God himself will provide a lamb.

I know God.

I've been walking with God.

Me and God are close.

I know he's a God of love.

I know he loves you because he gave you to me.

God will provide a lamb.

And yet he did not waver.

He built the altar, he put Isaac on it, he drew his dagger.

The story ends with a male lamb caught in a thicket.

A substitute that took the place of Isaac.

God provided the lamb that was needed.

And it saved Isaac.

One man who went on to live an important life.

And yet what is to come is even more important.

Over a thousand years later, God would send his only son.

And yet this time, his son would not be spared the way that Isaac was spared.

And there's a reason.

It's because his son was the Lamb.

When Jesus was first announced publicly, when he very first started his ministry, he was announced by his cousin, John the Baptist.

And this is how he was announced.

Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

What did God say to Abraham?

I know that you trust me because you have not withheld your only son from me.

That is exactly how Paul describes why you and I can have confidence in God.

He wrote to the church in Rome and said, What then are we to say about these things?

If God is for us, who can be against us?

Why do we have so much confidence?

Because God did not even spare his own son, but gave him up for us all.

How will he not also with him grant us everything?

For Abraham to be the father of God's people, he had to have a heart like God's.

How did God know that he could trust him?

I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your only son from me.

How do you know you can trust the Father?

Because God, who did not even spare his own son, but gave him up for us all.

The story of Abraham and Isaac pointed forward to an event that showed even greater love from our Heavenly Father, who would do whatever it takes to bring us back into relationship with him.

It taught us that God will never demand that we sacrifice our own sons to be in right standing with him.

He will sacrifice his son so that we can be in relationship with our Father.

This is why Jesus says in John 3:16, for God loved the world in this way.

John 3:16

In other words, this is how much God loves you, that he gave his one and only son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish, but will have eternal life.

Generations and generations after Abraham, his family found themselves trapped in captivity to the Egyptians.

Now God was getting ready to deliver them via miraculous means, but the people had a part to play to demonstrate their faith.

You might be familiar with the story.

They had been trapped in bondage in Egypt for 400 years, ten generations of Israelites.

And God sent a man named Moses, and Moses came to Pharaoh and pronounced nine plagues, and these plagues were very impressive, and they got the Pharaoh's attention.

And he almost let the Israelites go a couple of times, but then he would change his mind.

The tenth plague was going to involve death.

And in order for the angel of death to pass over your home and leave you spared, you had to follow the instructions of the Lord.

Now, anyone could follow these instructions, but first you had to believe that what God said was true.

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month they must each select an animal of the flock according to their families, one animal per family.

And you must have an unblemished animal, a year old male, and you may take it from either the sheep or the goats.

You're to keep it until the fourteenth day of this month.

Then the whole assembly of the community of Israel will slaughter the animal at twilight.

They must take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses where they eat them.

You want to talk about foreshadowing, this would have made a cross of blood, the corner of their doorposts.

And they are to eat the meat that night.

They should eat it, roasted over the fire, along with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.

And here is how you must eat it.

You must be dressed for travel, your sandals on your feet, your staff in your hand.

You're to eat in a hurry.

It's the Lord's Passover.

And then he tells them this day is to be a memorial for you, and you must celebrate it as a festival to the Lord.

You're to celebrate it throughout your generations as a permanent statute.

And this meal, for hundreds and hundreds, hundreds of years, every year was celebrated by the Jewish people.

It was a testimony about how God used Moses to rescue them and bring them on to the promised land and how they could trust God to rescue them in the future.

In the New Testament, we see Jesus do something that doesn't really strike us as all That's odd, but it would have floored and possibly infuriated the people who are around him.

And of course, it happened over Passover.

On the first day of unleavened bread, this is Mark's gospel in the New Testament, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, his disciples asked Jesus, Where do you want us to go and prepare the Passover so that you may eat it?

Now, the disciples, many of them have been with Jesus for about three years now.

Number one, this tells us every year, Jesus, as a good Jewish man, ate and celebrated the Passover meal.

The disciples found him a spot and finally the time came to observe the Passover meal.

Now, over the centuries, every element of the meal became symbolic for what had happened with Moses and the Israelites in Egypt.

That is what the meal represented, and that alone.

But Jesus takes the meal and he takes the elements and he makes them about himself.

In verse 22, as they were eating, Jesus took the bread, blessed it, and broke it, gave it to them, and said, Take it and eat it.

This is my body.

And then he took a cup, and after giving thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it, and he said to them, This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for you.

So it's very, very difficult for us to imagine because the Passover meal isn't significant to us like it was significant to the Israelites.

But we do have a few traditions that we know of and we're familiar with.

Like when Jesus told us to go into the world and baptize people in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And on April 7th, we're gonna baptize a whole bunch of people in all three of our services.

And when you get in the water, you kind of know what's gonna happen.

We're gonna say, I baptize you today in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, because that's what Jesus told us to do, right?

And then we're gonna dunk you in the water and we're gonna bring you back up.

Now imagine you went to a service and you got in the water, and it all seemed good, but right before we put you in, we were like, and I baptize you, my brother, in the name of Billy Graham, Stephen Furtick, and Larry the Cucumber, buried with Christ.

Y'all would be like, yo, that's not how it goes.

You'd run me out of the church.

It's blasphemy.

Obviously, that's not what that's about.

This is what Jesus did.

Over a thousand years.

The first Passover was in 1312 BC.

1,300 years before Jesus was even born.

He takes a 1,300-year-old tradition that has always been about Moses.

And he makes it about himself.

Jesus does this because he knows he is about to become the new Passover sacrifice.

This is the last supper.

And the next day on Passover, he would be nailed to a cross.

Now you might be thinking, okay, you gotta put together your four shadows, that four shadows.

This one feels like a little bit of a stretch, you know?

This is how the first church understood what Jesus did that night.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 5 and said, Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new unleavened batch, as indeed you are, for Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.

The first Passover, 1312 BC, it actually won the Israelites their freedom from Egypt, but it was also a shadow of what was to come.

The blood of the lambs in Egypt protected each family from death that night, but the blood of Jesus, our new Passover lamb, did something greater.

It protects all of those who believe from death forever.

Our third shadow comes after the Israelites had escaped Egypt and they were on their way to the promised land.

God gave them the law.

613 rules, regulations, and commands for every aspect of life, including how the sacrificial system was to work among the Israelite people.

Now, the sacrificial system all led up to the most important day, the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur is so essential because it's when, as a community, their sins are cleansed through very brutal, very bloody sacrifices, and they are atoned, which means you are at one again with God.

Leviticus 16 lays out all of the details of the Day of Atonement.

There was cleansing and preparation.

This was a very solemn day of fasting and prayer and sacrifice.

There were sacrifices for the priest.

The priest would slaughter an entire bull to cover their own sin so they could approach God in the Holy of Holies.

Then from among the people, they would take male, spotless, aka perfect lambs, and they would get two of these lambs.

Now, they would actually cast lots to determine what was gonna happen with each of the goats.

The goats would have been incredibly nervous because one of them is going to get got, right?

They cast lots, and whichever goat it lands on, that goat gets sacrificed.

Blood everywhere.

The next goat gets set free.

It's called the scapegoat.

And they would take the blood from the first sacrifice, and they would put it on the head of the second goat, and they would release it outside of the city as a demonstration that God was removing the sins of the people as far as the east is from the west.

It's a heavy process.

For a lot of modern people, just reading about the Day of Atonement is actually kind of difficult to stomach.

And it's important because it highlights what our sin actually costs.

This would happen every single year, year after year after year, until Jesus came.

And the book of Hebrews in the New Testament goes to great lengths to show that this was simply a shadow of God's plan for how to deal with the sin of humanity.

We're gonna do a quick tour through the book of Hebrews in the New Testament.

Hebrews 9 says, But Christ has appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come in the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is not of this creation.

He entered the most holy place once for all time, not by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption.

Right away we get the ultimate plot twist in the story.

That not only is Jesus the great and final high priest, but he is also the sacrificial lamb.

Hebrews 9 reminds us, if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a young cow, sprinkling those who are defiled, sanctify them.

Verse 14, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works so that we can serve the living God?

It continues in chapter 10.

It says, Every priest stands day after day after day after month after year after year, giving the same sacrifices time after time, again and again and again, which can never take away sins.

But this man, Jesus, after offering one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God.

The entire sacrificial system, the whole day of atonement, it was a shadow of what was to come.

Jesus, both the high priest and the sacrificial lamb and the scapegoat, taking our sins as far as the east is from the west.

Every single element of the Day of Atonement was taken care of in the death and the resurrection of Jesus.

Every single gospel testifies that Jesus was killed outside the walls of the city of Jerusalem.

Here's what Hebrews 13 says.

For as the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the most holy place by the high priest as a sin offering, they're burned outside the camp.

Therefore, Jesus also suffered outside the gate, so that he might sanctify the people by his own blood.

You see, what the human system had to constantly do, year after year after year, Jesus did once and for all at the cross, and understanding the Day of Atonement, how brutal and how bloody it was, and understanding what happened on what we call Good Friday to Jesus, how brutal and barbaric and bloody it was.

It reminds us the price of our sin that you and I no longer have to bear if we just put our faith in the one who bore it for us.

One more shadow.

After Abraham and Isaac, after Egypt, even after the giving of the law, the Israelites found themselves in the wilderness being attacked by poisonous carpet vipers.

They were deadly.

People were dying left and right.

And so God put a plan together.

Moses came and he said, Will you remove the snakes?

And God said, No.

He said, Instead, I will give you a solution.

And let me just be honest, this is one of those kind of weird Old Testament stories.

The solution didn't make a lot of sense.

In Numbers 21, the Lord said to Moses, make a snake image and mount it on a pole.

And when anyone who is bitten looks at it, he will recover.

So Moses made a bronze snake, mounted it on a pole.

And whenever someone was bitten and he looked at the bronze snake, he was saved.

This happened about 1300 years before Christ.

And it almost felt like God was asking Moses to do something he had already commanded them not to do.

It felt kind of like making an idol.

As a matter of fact, the bronze serpent shows up again in the Old Testament.

It's an old relic in the back of the temple, and people brought it out and started bowing down and worshiping it.

King Hezekiah smashed it into pieces because they started worshiping the serpent instead of the God who had healed people through it.

It's a really kind of odd history.

So why the serpent on the pole?

Well, partly because people were being bit by poisonous vipers and God loved his people and wanted them to be healed, but it was also a shadow.

It's like a setup that had its payoff 1,300 years later.

You see, when Jesus was on earth, one of the most important conversations he had became one of our most important chapters of scripture, John chapter 3.

John 3 · chapter mention

And that is a conversation between Jesus and a man named Nicodemus.

Nicodemus was a high-ranking, well-respected Pharisee of that time, which meant he was a religious leader and he knew the scriptures backwards and forwards.

He even knew about the odd circumstance of the bronze serpent.

Strange little moment in the life of Moses.

And what's happening in this conversation is Jesus is trying to help Nicodemus understand that he has now brought to earth something brand new.

He is the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham.

He is ready to bless all the nations of the earth through the life he was going to live.

That he is the new Passover lamb, helping all people in all places escape from death.

He is the new day of atonement, sacrificing himself for the lives of all of us sinners.

And Nicodemus couldn't understand it.

Finally, Jesus said, I'm talking to you about earthly things and you don't get it.

How are you gonna ever understand if I start talking to you about heavenly things?

And then he goes to a story that he knows.

Nicodemus.

We'll know.

See, we know John 3.16, for God loved the world this much, he gave his one and only son.

Most people don't know verses 14 and 15 that lead up to it.

John 3.14, Jesus said to Nicodemus, Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.

You see, what's interesting about that moment with the bronze serpent is the Israelites kind of lived under the system of law where you had to earn things.

Like if you wanted your sins covered, you had to go get one of your lambs, and you probably liked it, and it was cute, and you had to bring it to the temple and sharpen your knife, you know, like it was tough.

Everything was earned.

But if you got bit by a carpet viper in the middle of the wilderness, you didn't have to work.

What makes the story unique is it's one of these central points where all you're asked to do is look.

And the word in the Hebrew that Moses was instructed by God, this word looked at the serpent, it's the Hebrew word ra'a.

It's a word that means to look with belief or to look with expectation, to look with faith.

How are you healed?

One look of faith.

Jesus came to a world where everyone was looking for something to believe in, and everyone assumed they had to work their way to it.

And he chose the one story where poison was coursing through their veins, there was nothing they could do about it except look and have faith.

And Jesus says, I'm on earth to do the same thing.

The poison of sin is coursing through the lives of everyone everywhere.

There is no answer, there is no hope unless you look to the cross with faith.

Then he said, Nicodemus, that's how much God loves you.

You're a teacher of the law, you know it backwards and forwards, but you don't yet know how much God loves you.

He loves you so much that he did what Abraham did not have to do.

He sent his one and only son.

So that everyone who takes one look of faith will never die, but will be given eternal life.

These are just four shadows of countless moments and stories Abraham and Isaac, the Passover Lamb, the Day of Atonement, and the Bronze Serpent.

All of the Old Testament pointing to and prophesying the coming of the one person who you can believe in that can actually hold the weight of your faith and your hope, your future, and even your eternity.

Here's what we believe: the Bible isn't simply another book, and Jesus isn't simply another historical or religious figure.

The Bible caught its own shots.

These prophets spoke the words of God, and you can believe it, because they came true.

No other religious book can claim this, no other religious figure has ever accomplished this.

And here's why this greatly matters.

Because the same scripture that pointed over 300 times to Jesus and all were fulfilled, has also pointed us to what comes next.

And if God is batting a thousand already, maybe it's worth us paying attention.

When he says things like, the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout and with the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first, and we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord.

Paul wrote that, it's a prophecy of what comes next, and he wrote it to those who are in Christ.

How do you become in Christ?

How do you become a child of God?

Scripture says, and Jesus said, just as the bronze serpent was lifted up to heal those infected with the poison of the vipers, Jesus was lifted up.

For those of us infected with sin, and all it takes is one moment, one look of faith.

Would you pray with me?

Right where you're at, if you would bow your head and close your eyes, just create some space for you and for the people around you to reflect.

Perhaps you're here or you're streaming with us online, and you've just struggled.

You struggled putting it all together, but it is undeniable to you that God has been pressing in on your life, showing up in unexpected ways, maybe even during the service.

The Holy Spirit of God has been moving on your heart.

To know the good news of Jesus, we have to first understand the bad news.

And the bad news is that we are all separated from God.

He did not separate from us, we separated from Him.

All we like sheep have gone astray, each has turned to their own way.

That's another Old Testament prophecy.

Our sin separates us from a perfect God.

But the next part, the prophecy says, and the Lord has laid the iniquity of us all on him, on Jesus.

Jesus took your sin, past, present, and future, the worst things you've ever done, the worst things you've ever thought, the biggest mistakes you've ever made.

The same way that the sins of the community were put on the scapegoat, your sins were placed on Christ.

And he paid for those sins outside the gate with his life.

You live in a world that's gonna convince you that you have to earn anything you get.

Jesus says, You can't earn it, none of us deserve it.

It's an actual free gift, all it takes is faith.

If you're here today and you've never had a moment in time where you have put your faith in Jesus, where you acknowledge that you believe he's God, that he came to earth, died for your sins, rose again, and is coming back someday, that he is the only one who can secure eternal life with God for you.

If you've never had that moment and you're ready today, I want to ask you for a moment of courage, everyone's eyes closed, to just lift your hand up where I can see it and know who I'm praying with.

Amen.

All around the room, hands going up, saying, Today is my day.

Amen.

Amen.

God is moving in this place, and you need to know this that Jesus sees your faith in this moment.

There are no hoops to jump through, there's no classes you have to attend.

In this moment, your confession of faith has moved you from death to life.

This moment has brought you into an eternal and lasting relationship with God.

What you do from this moment moving forward is on you.

You have believed in Jesus, and now your best life will be found following Him.

Here's what I want to do: I want to help you acknowledge this moment of faith.

So, everyone who raised a hand, along with all the believers in the room, I want us to pray this prayer out loud.

Let's pray.

Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

I believe you are God that you came to earth, died for my sins, and I believe you rose again.

Today I thank you for a new eternal life.

Let me pray over you.

Heavenly Father, I can't even imagine how you feel when children who you love enough to give your life for come home.

I can't begin to imagine how you celebrate at lives that were spiritually dead and have been made new.

I can't begin to imagine what's happening in heaven right now.

The celebration of people added to your kingdom.

I pray that today would be the beginning of a new life.

That through trials and tribulations, imperfect as we are, falling and stumbling along the way, that we would find out what it means to follow you, Jesus, into a life of purpose.

We love you and we celebrate you all in your name, Jesus.

And everybody said, Amen.

Y'all give the Lord a hand.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

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If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.